A Generation of Sociopaths Quotes

“The central theme of this book is that America’s present dilemma resulted substantially and directly from choices made by the Baby Boomers. Their collective, pathological self-interest derailed a long train of progress, while exacerbating and ignoring existential threats like climate change. The Boomers’ sociopathic need for instant gratification pushed them to equally sociopathic policies, causing them to fritter away an enormous inheritance, and when that was exhausted, to mortgage the future. When the consequences became troubling, Boomer leadership engaged in concealment and deception in a desperate effort to hold the system together just long enough for their generational constituencies to pass from the scene. The story of the Boomers is, in other words, the story of a generation of sociopaths running amok.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Uncle Jim may think kids these days are terrible (Snapchat! Tattoos! Jeans in the office!), but when confronted with the evidence of what actually happened in the Sixties, he might fall refreshingly silent, especially when you explain exactly how many of your tax dollars subsidize his health care. The nonsociopathic wing of the Boomer generation may also find value in seeing the acts of their contemporaries in a different light and be persuaded to stand against a sociopathic agenda that serves them at the expense of their children.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“In a 2014 survey, a majority of Boomers did not know that humans descended from earlier forms of animal.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“[Sociopaths] may have a history of many sexual partners… They may have associated disorders… substance use disorders… and other disorders of impulse control… [They] also often have personality features that meet criteria for other personality disorders, particularly borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. —DSM-V2 As”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“What happened to the future? The Boomers did; they sold it off piece by piece. And”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“The sociopaths’ goal is to wring every last dollar from the system, and any investment that could not be fully realized within Boomer lifetimes was to be avoided. Therefore, the nation’s infrastructure, built by the Boomers’ parents and once the world’s finest, was allowed to decay. Henceforth, state-sponsored research would be radically curtailed. Higher education was neglected; the Boomers had their cost-free diplomas in hand, so meaningful reform and costly subsidies were no longer relevant.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“The opportunities of the coming years should be seized; for issues like climate and debt, the elections of the coming years may be the last stops before irreversible catastrophe.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“The Boomers were the first modern generation to harbor really negative feelings about reality and science, and their success in undermining these goods has been tremendous.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Going forward, it would be “three strikes, you’re out.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors… deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal [gain]… Deceit and manipulation are central features of antisocial personality disorder… —DSM-V7”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“In the 1960s, when Boomers were on campus, public colleges charged nominal, and often zero, annual tuition; today, in-state tuition runs around $13,500. The”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Hillary Clinton, the longtime fixture of the Boomer establishment, viewed her nomination in the same way that seniors view Social Security, as an entitlement to be realized whatever the risk. Donald Trump, the Section 8 scion, a bully whose quantum of thought is no greater than a tweet, decided to prove that the lowest common denominator could be found further down than anyone in the commentariat thought possible. That Clinton and Trump were the two most unpopular presidential candidates in decades, if not since the Civil War, deterred the Boomer machine not a whit, because they all agreed on what mattered. Thus,”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Society is no comfort To one not sociable. —William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 4, Scene 2 Great”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Even a plague of generational locusts like the Boomers can do only so much damage in a lifetime, however unduly prolonged that lifetime may be courtesy of benefits funded by the young. These”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Part of the problem was caused by the difficulty of STEM, which is more challenging for the average student than other disciplines. Difficult things do not sit well with people for whom immediate gratification and impulse control present problems, i.e., sociopaths.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Alarmed by shifts in public opinion, the NSB devoted an entire section of its 1976 annual report to the issue. Four years later, things were no better, and the president of the National Academy of Sciences warned that “there has arisen an antiscientific, antirationalist trend that should give us pause.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“The Boomers inherited a productive family farm with a modest mortgage; in twenty years, their children will take over a crumbling estate leveraged to the hilt.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Society is no comfort
To one not sociable. —William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 4, Scene 2”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“All tin-pot expropriators have fragile egos, and if sarcasm helps ease the Boomers out of office, let there be sarcasm. (Foreward)”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Reagan (or, at least, the public’s version of him) was tailor-made for the sociopathic electorate. Never again would the Boomers be told to save, or adjust the thermostat, or define themselves other than by their material possessions, to work on their families, to trust a meddlesome government, to abandon the pursuit of unrestrained individualism, or to undertake an “all-out effort” of any kind. All problems would be resolved by neoliberalism, for once the decks had been cleared of encumbering regulation and the human bilge discharged from the holds of the welfare state, things would take care of themselves: growth, jobs, inflation, consumption, all of it.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Television operates at a distinct disadvantage to print—adults can read about twice as many words per minute as news anchors typically speak, and this does not account for the various commercials, empty banter, and other substance-free filler that consume a third or more of the average broadcast.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“These conditions were all provided for by the Boomers’ elders, who worked and saved to ensure that the fiscal house was in reasonable order when it was passed down. Doing so required older generations to tax themselves at rates that no politician today, however far Left, would dare propose. When possible, it was pay as you go, so unlike more recent wars, the Korean War was substantially financed out of current tax receipts, as were many of the great infrastructure projects, whose costs were overwhelmingly borne by earlier generations even though later generations would reap so much of their benefit. In cases where no level of tax could balance the budget, as was the case with World War II, prior generations retired the debt as quickly as possible. Motivated by fiscal probity, Americans paid extraordinary taxes for two decades, with the highest marginal rate a downright confiscatory 94 percent in 1945 (against which today’s 39.6 percent, the source of so much present angst, seems modest).17 The result of these sacrifices was that, by the 1960s, World War II debt had been reduced to a manageable size. Taxes could therefore be lowered, though the top rate remained a hefty 70 percent.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“the crisis was not so much acute as it is ongoing, beginning with the S&L disaster of the mid-1980s and continuing with the LTCM emergency of 1998, the dot-com crash of 2000, and the housing and financial panics of 2008. And yet, over years of Boomer control the response has always been the same: more deregulation, more spending, lower taxes, and no adequate structural reform during the windows of opportunity between scandals.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Infrastructure demands providence and sharing; sociopaths offer imprudence and shortsighted self-interest, and that translates to neglect.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Gabler wraps up by citing the statistic that 21 percent of Americans view a lottery win as the most practical way to accumulate wealth. Of course, Gabler and the Boomers did win the lottery: They were born in the richest and most dynamic economy the world had ever seen, midcentury America. They just did what so many do with lottery lucre: waste it.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Hoover and Mellon did more than history gives them credit for (i.e., they did more than absolutely nothing) and it’s never been clear if Mellon actually called for anyone to be “liquidated.” None of that mattered, because by the election of 1932, the market was clearly not healing itself. The other parts of Adam Smith’s hand might have been invisible, but the position of its middle digit could be easily detected.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“Given that people spend more than twice as many hours watching TV than they do socializing, TV sets the tone for all communication, and that tone is unidirectional, the conveyance of opinion rather than the mutuality of conversation. The box speaks one way to the audience, and the people inside the box often speak past each other; it’s soliloquy, not dialogue.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“America suffers from its present predicament because a large group of small-minded people chose the leaders and actions that led to our present degraded state. Combing over the data, a picture emerges, one of bad behaviors and unchecked self-interest, occurring at the individual level and recapitulated, via the voting booth, by the state.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“The nonsociopathic wing of the Boomer generation may also find value in seeing the acts of their contemporaries in a different light and be persuaded to stand against a sociopathic agenda that serves them at the expense of their children.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

“For those readers who are Boomers, or have parents or grandparents who are Boomers, it may be of small comfort that this book does not argue that all Baby Boomers are sociopaths. Rather, the argument is that an unusually large number of Boomers have behaved antisocially, skewing outcomes in ways deeply unfavorable to the nation, especially its younger citizens.”
― Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America